Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Blackmail September

Israel Matzav looks at newspaper reports that sexually explicit videotapes of Fatah and Hamas leaders engaging in illicit relations recorded for blackmail purposes are now in the hands of Hamas.

Hamas members discovered dozens of recorded sexual encounters of leading figures, which were being used by the security forces as blackmail. According to Maariv, Fatah ordered the videotapes to be destroyed so they did not fall into the hands of Hamas. Hamas said the videotapes involve several Fatah ministers and prominent leaders. ... The paper added that some of the videotapes were recordings of Hamas leaders, one of whom was forced to collaborate with Fatah against Hamas. The tape showed him cheating on his wife.

Maariv added that some of the women who appeared in the tapes were imported prostitutes. Maariv’s reporter said that he had seen one of the tapes which was recorded in a hospital and involved a doctor with a girl. The reporter said that this type of blackmail is very common.

The reporter knows it is very common, eh? You could have knocked me down with a feather. Imagine that Fatah, the organization of Yasser Arafat, Nobel Prize Winner and Father of the Nation, or Hamas, those Paladins of Islamic rectitude engage in this common type of blackmail. Well blow me down. Oops. Wrong choice of words.

Pity the Palestinians, whose lives are in these people's hands. Pity the readers of newspapers, who are always, as they say, the last to know.

22 Comments:

It's a matter of public record that John F. Kennedy was running whores through the White House. However Kennedy would probably have laughed if someone was so naive as to attempt controlling him with sexual blackmail (the same wasprobably be true with Bill Clinton). These Palestinian leaders sound as gullible as children to be suceptible to an ordinary honey trap.

Makes you wonder what sort of tapes who had of Arafat doing what with/to his bodyguards. And further, how many of those bodyguards also died of mysterious undiagnosed illnesses that would be recognized as AIDS in the rest of the world outside of Ramallah and Paris.

What interests me is that Hamas didn't quietly tell the targets of character assassination about these videos and leave it at that. Instead, Hamas, by making its video archaeology public, is undermining the usefulness of its stash.

If they were smart, Hamas emissaries would say, "Hi. We have that video of you with that Portuguese hooker. Don't worry. It's in safe hands. Don't cause us any problems and you'll have nothing to worry about." Instead, they are looking to publicly humiliate Fatah, and in so doing show their utter clumsiness in the art of arm twisting.

It was common for enemies of the Ku Klux Klan to buy up membership lists in the early 1930's. Let's just say that possession of such a list was a standard form of political leverage in those days. And it wouldn't surprise me if bureaucrats, newspapers, or politicians get their hands on escort verification databases sometime in the future. Although implicit blackmail is not the most pleasant tool of statecraft, it is historically a standard form of leverage for competent statesmen.

Using blackmail is sleazy, to be sure, but I would be shocked if Middle Eastern despots didn't resort to it, considering all the other methods they use. Blackmail can be an effective means of exercising power, and since Islamism is about worshipping power, it would seem impious for Islamists not to use it. That is, unless Islamism is less about political power than forcing other people to watch the pornography of the suicide bomber, or perhaps now the pornography of publicly shaming the political opponents of Hamas.

Alexis and Eggplant -- you are projecting Western cultural ideas to Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas's move is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Gaza and the West Bank suffer from teeming masses of young men with no hope of female companionship much less marriage. Polygamy, dowry systems, and caste systems in arranged marriages ensure that.

This is the supply of Jihad and terrorism and the bully boys of Hamas.

Now drop onto those masses of young men the corrupt, and it must be said, OLDER men cavorting with prostitutes and it's a frickin bombshell, quote Dr. Evil. It pushes even the most loyal Fatah gunmen towards Hamas if he can make a deal, because he sees that the Fatah bigshots will once again, "hoard all the women" to their way of thinking.

Women are the fundamentally "scarce resource" in Muslim lands, offensive for us to think like that to be sure, but that is who Muslims in these lands think themselves.

No one will care about morality and such. They will care about senior Fatah people cavorting with prostitutes instead of showing solidarity with "the brothers" etc.

Everyone inside the West Bank and Gaza knew Arafat was gay as could be, they didn't care. Since that was one less leader who would "hoard women" on them.

Palestinian men could make a break from tribal ways and outlaw polygamy, ensure decent treatment for women, adopt the Western Model of romantic love based on individualism, BUT that would threaten the tribal/clan identity and it's a step the Muslim world has refused to take since it's inception, it's a fools game to think they've any chance in changing now as opposed to the prior 1500 odd years or so.

Which means the entire Muslim world is basically Gaza and the West Bank writ large, with more or less conflict based on exploitable resources, or remittances, or less stealing of money at the top.

This is the flip side of consumerism/materialism stemming from a feminized culture emphasizing status, prestige, hereditary sinecures, risk avoidance etc. Hyper-masculine cultures don't co-operate well, have low trust inherent in every transaction in life, are a zero-sum game of who can steal the most. It resembles nothing more than the social life of a pride of lions, with each young lion looking for the weakness in the dominant male that can signal the ability to kill him and take over his harem, rule the pride.

So yeah, Hamas is brilliant beyond belief. This will play very well among it's intended audience and signal that the dominant lion is easily overthrown.

Considering you can be executed for engaging in a variety of offenses such as adultery & homosexuality, it may just be a little house cleaning/power play. As Stalin said "Death solves all problems: No man, no problem."

This story provides a peek behind the formal, pious politico-religious talk about martyrdoom, and the longing for the olive groves of the lost villages of Palestine, etc. That's the front office. But there's a backoffice component where the tools are the bomb, dismembering knife and the hidden video camera. Intimidation is the engine which makes the whole thing run. Terrorism is exactly that: politics by intimidation.

It's not at all surprising to me that this sort of corruption exists in Palistan.

What's more to the point is that Fatah didn't destroy these tapes. They should have destroyed them as Saigon er Gaza was falling. They should have destroyed all the alleged CIA documents that were reported to have been captured by Hamas.

These guys are total incompetents. How can Israel ever expect that a deal with them will hold up? The guys in the Mossad must be having a good laugh over this one.

Whatever the case, Johnson did not subsequently press the matter with the Israelis. Rusk delivered a harsh protest to Ambassador Harmon, but then let the matter go. Among other things, LBJ believed, the attack on the Liberty would get Feinberg and the American friends of Israel off his back and give him some leverage with the Israelis as the terms of a peace settlement came to be worked out.

As a rule, Arab men aren't interested in female companionship. They want sex. In fact, one of the advantages of Arab women (from the point of view of most Arab men) is that those few women who are interested in illicit sex are upfront about it, as opposed to women from Europe and North America would want a relationship and companionship and someone to talk to. Compare that to the sexual games described toward the end of the docudrama Death of a Princess.

An older man is vulnerable to leverage, for if he wants extra sex on the side, he doesn't want to anger his wife (and most Palestinian men have one wife). Yet if older men are vulnerable to leverage, younger men are fickle and will shift their loyalties to whichever way the wind blows. And young men are enormously vulnerable to a game called follow the pussy, and they don't really care where that prize comes from.

If your analysis were truly accurate, the Abu Ghraib scandal would have been a brilliant masterwork of American propaganda, for the thought of an American woman engaging in any sexual fetish (even of the most sadistic variety) would be highly enticing.

Rich men will pay top dollar to be treated the way Lynndie England treated her prisoners.

If your analysis is accurate, the most effective means to defeat al-Qaeda would be to slaughter every member of the Saudi royal family, for that tribe of parasites has been laying claim to enormous numbers of women that could have been available to young Saudi men! And that may keep Saudi men from looking for pussy in Paradise.

Alexis, when I look at video of the Muslim marchers, wherever they may be, most often I see men with few women present. You can say all you want about sexual energies, yet men in New Guinea, England, Africa, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Cuba, etc. are still men...men who run around seeking to find a woman with whom they can deposit sperm; for many reasons I'm sure. Nature has fun in its designs.

Men in the middle east (those who practice Islam); these guys choose to treat women in very special ways. It is being said that there are web sites wherein Saudi women are stripping... Arafat is alledged to have had a thing for males. The Kinsey group would love to measure sexual behaviors in these societies, if they haven't already. But let's set this aside.

Sense of self, this is what I am thinking; in particular the males. I see castrated males in the Islamic world who march, protest, wear hoods, become terrorists, carry knives for beheadings...and perform clitorectomies.

They also love their mustaches! Sure, they project this sense of being real men...project. It's how they treat their women that confounds me...to a point, that is.

Is this not the land of harems? Nature works with this model, my ranching cousin needs one bull for every 42 cows. Don't we neuter the remainder for our food?

Men who have no jobs, no family, no wife, with very little structure: Aren't these the guys we would want to bring into our mass movement?

How many wives does that rich Saudi former construction businesssman...Osama Bin Laden have? Blue dress and sex tapes, (Paris, Pamela, Kim...oh please!) it all works when they are secrets!

As to what happened at Abu Ghraib, please...blame those in Congress who decided to rely on semi active military personnel post Viet Nam. Do we place our best fighters watching captured personnel, or do we throw "whats" into that job? Take a look at American prisons for one of the answers.

Where are the American women, those "chicks" of the 70's who burned their bras? They should be the loudest voices in liberating the Islamic females...unless of course they have come full circle and are now proponents of kinky sex!

"Abdul...bring me the burka tonight, you nasty little boy!"

Little big men trying to control little men is what this is all about. Sex tapes are the pretty ends to their whips with which they strike and flog their troops or those who they need to control.

Religion of peace...sure? I am not so sure...and I suspect as times marches on there will be more who think likewise.

I see castrated males in the Islamic world who march, protest, wear hoods, become terrorists, carry knives for beheadings...and perform clitorectomies.

Exactly. Hardly "hypermasculine". The ancient Sumerians had a way to tame such men -- hookers. Look at the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

That said, men in other parts of the world pride themselves on self-control. The ability to control one's sexuality is a sign of masculinity, or at least maturity. In contrast, Arab society lacks self-control and expects women to veil themselves lest men lose control over their sexual selves. In other parts of the world, a man is unsexy if he cannot control himself. In a society where arranged marriage is the rule, self-control is not necessary for courtship and may be detrimental if one's arranged bride is ugly.

It's like the difference between a man who can control his appetite at a friend's banquet and a glutton who cannot control his appetite, eats so much food that he doubles over in pain, and then blames his host for making too much food available for him!

Men who have no jobs, no family, no wife, with very little structure: Aren't these the guys we would want to bring into our mass movement?

If that's what Hamas wants, its actions make sense. However, one cannot rule such men. They may be cannon fodder, but they are fickle and are as liable to devour their leaders as to devour anyone else. Hamas is playing with fire, and if it is not careful, it may blow up in its face.

No matter what happens with the war in Iraq, it is instructive about why democracy doesn't take root in the Middle East. Those Middle Easterners who blame the West for supporting local tyrants have it all wrong. The reason why local tyrants stay in power is because it is the natural order of the local society. Despite occasional whining and blaming outsiders, the locals seem to prefer tyranny over freedom. Patriarchy necessarily teaches passivity and obedience to tyrants, and necessarily creates a surplus of sexually frustrated young men. And it is pointless to convince someone to embrace the freedom of speech or the freedom of conscience when he has no freedom to choose whom he will marry.

No, I do not regret the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He celebrated the September 11 attacks, and this alone is a sufficient casus belli. However, it was not wise for certain people to act as the Pygmalion of the Middle East. Democracy can work in the Middle East so long as it is a tribal democracy that involves a balance of power among tribal elders. But to expect massive social change with a new regime is a bit much to ask.

And no, I don’t blame the ills of the Middle East on Islam. Patriarchy, passivity, and oriental despotism have debilitated the region for a far longer time than Islam’s existence. And bandits from the Nejd went on raids against civilized regions long before Mohammed was ever born. One of the essential problems with the neo-Caliphites is that they exalt Pharaonic power in the garb of Islam. And the exaltation of oriental despotism as a political ideology is one of the hallmarks of classical fascism.

Hamas is playing with fire, and if it is not careful, it may blow up in its face.

It did not blow up in Mohamed's face - nor in the face of the many who have since taken the task to speak for Allah and his Prophet.

Mohamed et al are Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and the Muslims the men who happily give up their freedom lest they suffer the responsibility and pain of conscience. Ivan Karamazov had the story right even if he had the religion wrong.

I'm not sure hypermasculine was a right word choice. What I was trying to get at was that the West, culturally, has always been formed on the basis of yeomanry, i.e. a man might pledge his life and service to his king, but his king had no right to his wife. That his king in turn had the duty to protect his man's rights not to have his wife abducted into some harem.

Much of what I see in jihad (the emphasis on sexual fulfillment, "virgins" who will be for the man only, not someone else's, etc.) are born out of the inability to form nuclear families or even have a wife of one's own. While this arrangement has been very stable in the past, I see fragility because the idea that Qutb, Khomeni, Banr, and bin Laden all seized on: the seduction of the West's individuality.

The tribal/clan/religious identity now has to compete with the idea of individuality, choice, and yes, yeomanry, the idea that a man can have a wife and have her taken away by the big man. For most of the Palestinians, lacking the money (siphoned away by the big man), the social status (again) or supply of women (again), they are frustrated.

But the AK-47 is the great equalizer, perhaps it was Mikhail Kalashnikov who made all men equal. Throwing Hamas men off buildings, what did that accomplish? The message was "these men stole your money/women/power" etc. and "we are taking it back."

Every form of violence in Gaza and the West Bank is exquisitely calculated to send a direct and unmistakable political message to the people. I think the release of the tapes will send a direct message: Fatah deprives you of women (instead of fighting the enemy), we are better chiefs and join Hamas for glorious conquest and slaves.

Such a tribal/clan society only works when there is constant raiding on an enemy to provide spoils distributed to the young men, and enough patronage to buy loyalty of the foot soldiers. The Arab world is rife with coups and assassinations from the beginning, and the AK-47 and RPG only makes it easier for coup plotters to succeed.

Implications:

Israel cannot make a deal since structurally, the society MUST constantly war against them for spoils, and directing the young men outward instead of coup-oriented inward.

Hamas no less than Fatah will find young lions overthrowing the old, and soon Hamas senior fellows may find themselves tossed off buildings.

Structurally, Palestinians absent someone like Saddam ruling through mass graves cannot rule themselves, due to the dynamic of young lions constantly trying to overthrow the old ones, without living in absolute poverty and misery. Young lions vs. old ones does not get modern infrastructure built or maintained.

R -- thanks. I see a lot of big differences in Arab societies vs. more peaceful Western/Asian ones. Family structure being the top of the list.

No alternate hypothesis is necessary just a healthy dose of scepticism. Really, a report of moral turpitude gleaned from another blog linking to some article published online does not represent the truth and nothing but the truth. It sure may be true but to launch of on all kinds of consequences as Wretched and crew here have done is ludicrous especially in light of the constant moaning about the MSM which has equal if not more credibliltiy then this story. Sure, you want to believe it is true, but so f*cking what? Post the pics to demonstrate the veracity of these claims.